By David Pescovitz at 10:08 pm Thursday, Aug 28
• Comments • Share
bOING bOING patron saint
Robert Anton Wilson is running for California Governor! "After all, why should I remain the ONLY nutcase in California who ain't running," RAW says.
My party, the Guns and Dope Party, invites extremists of both right and left to unite behind our shared goals of:
1. Get those pointy-headed Washington bureaucrats off our backs and off our fronts too!
2. Guns for everybody who wants them; no guns for those who don't want them
3. Drugs for everybody who wants them; no drugs for those who don't want them
4. Freedom of choice, free love,free speech, free Internet and free beer
5. California secession -- Keep the anti-gun and anti-dope fanatics on the Eastern side of the Rockies
6. Lotsa wild parties every night by gun-toting dopers
7. Animal protection -- Support your right to keep and arm bears
More position papers will follow; we know at least 69 good positions.
I haven't been this excited about politics since
RU Sirius ran for President!
Link
Discuss
By Cory Doctorow at 5:16 am Thursday, Aug 28
• Comments • Share
Going to be at WorldCon? My reading is tomorrow night -- Friday -- at 5PM, in the Convention Center, room 203A. I'm going to be reading from the new 21,000-word novella I wrote last week -- your only chance to get at this story between now and its eventual publication, likely a year away.
Trish gathered her staff in the board room and wrote the following in glowing letters on the wall with her fingertip, leaving the text in her expressive schoolmarm's handwriting rather than converting it to some sterile font: "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win."
Her staff, all five of them, chuckled softly. "Recognize it?" she asked, looking round at them.
"Pee-Wee Herman?" said the grassroots guy, who was so young it ached to look at him, but who could fire a cannonload of email into any congressional office on 12 hours' notice. He never stopped joking.
The lawyer cocked an eyebrow at him and stroked her moustache, a distinctive gesture that you could see in any number of courtv archives of famous civil-rights battles, typically just before she unloaded both barrels at the jury-box and set one or another of her many precedents. "It's Martin Luther King, right?"
"Close," Trish said.
"Geronimo," guessed the paralegal, who probably wasn't going to work out after all, being something of a giant flake who spent more time on the phone to her girlfriend than filing papers and looking up precedents.
"Nope," Trish said, looking at the other two staffers -- the office manager and the media guy -- who shrugged and shook their heads. "It's Gandhi," she said.
They all went, "Ohhhh," except the grassroots guy, who crossed to the wall and used his fingertip to add, "And then they assassinate you."
"I'm too tough to die," the lawyer said. "And you're all too young. So I think we're safe."
Link
Discuss
By Cory Doctorow at 5:11 am Thursday, Aug 28
• Comments • Share
Danny O'Brien's got a good editorian in the Guardian today, explaining the BBC's Creative Archive project:
The BBC, in theory, shouldn't care how many times you share a copy of, say, Dixon of Dock Green. On the contrary, it should thank you. You're taking the hard work - and cost - out of distributing the works you have already paid for with your licence fee. So not only does the BBC not need to care about Napster and other file-sharing systems - it can actively take advantage of them. Distributing content in this way does not reduce the BBC's income, but it can reduce its costs. Copy protection devices and clampdowns on internet copying just get in the way of the BBC's mission.
Of course, simply allowing anyone to download and copy the BBC's output has its problems. While broadcasts are free, the BBC makes money selling DVDs and tapes of its work, and reselling to other countries. Not a great deal of money - less than 5% of the £3bn it receives in licence fees - but some.
Link
Discuss
